Balancing Paid & Organic Facebook Marketing

When you’re marketing your brand on Facebook, you have two options: organic and paid Facebook marketing. While some brands make the mistake of putting their eggs all in one basket, successful brands find a balance between organic Facebook marketing and paid Facebook marketing. These brands use organic strategies to gain, retain, and engage Facebook fans, and use paid strategies to boost organic efforts and to directly promote themselves.

If you’re struggling to see results from your own Facebook marketing efforts, you might not have found the right balance between organic and paid Facebook marketing. Nailing that balance can be harder than it seems, but can transform poor metrics into runaway popularity.

Organic Facebook Marketing Key to Growing Brand

One of the most common mistakes made by brands when marketing on Facebook is to neglect organic search. The most common reason for this? A lack of immediate results.

It can take several months before organic Facebook efforts start generating the results you expect. But without that initial slow-growth period, your brand has little chance of building a sustainable Facebook fanbase. That doesn’t just mean that you’ll need to rely on paid ads to get your content on consumers’ screens. It also means that you won’t be building the kinds of meaningful connections with consumers that organic content can create.

Paid Facebook Marketing Drives Immediate Results

There are two kinds of paid Facebook marketing: boosted posts and paid ads. Boosted posts help extend the reach of your organic Facebook content. You can boost an important or successful Facebook post to have it reach a wider audience of users. Typically, boosted posts work best as a paid extension of your organic efforts.

Meanwhile, paid ads offer a number of formats that allow you to promote your brand, products, services, and special offers directly in users’ timelines. Unlike organic Facebook marketing, paid ads can lead to immediate results and conversions. Facebook ads include targeting options that have made Facebook one of the most cost-effective ad streams available to marketers.

Finding Your Brand’s Balance on Facebook

Successfully marketing your brand on Facebook will mean finding the right balance between organic and paid Facebook marketing. That balance will depend on your brand’s immediate and long-term goals, along with your brand’s market and identity.

If your brand’s biggest concern is growing initial awareness about your brand or a specific product/service, Facebook ads and boosted posts are an effective way to get your brand in front of your target consumers.

If you’re concerned about building a loyal customer base and strengthening your relationship with those customers, investing more heavily in your organic Facebook efforts will be a smart bet.

If you need to drive immediate leads or sales, paid ads — particularly highly targeted ones — will be the best way to generate results.

In most cases, brands will have a mix of these three goals. Finding the right balance between organic and paid Facebook marketing efforts means measuring the importance of each to your business, assigning priority to different streams, and then building a Facebook marketing strategy that makes sense for your business.